Links for 10/28/10

Eric Hanushek

New York City's schools chancellor, with the support of Mayor Bloomberg, wants to release the value-added test score results for 12,000 teachers…

I've spent many years looking carefully at such data. I know it can be incendiary; I know it has flaws. Still, I strongly support its release.

Two principles lie behind this view. First, parents and taxpayers have a basic right to know about the effectiveness of the teachers and schools that they support. Second, it is impossible to think of improving our schools without focusing on the productivity of the teachers.
Value-added analysis is the best tool we have available to zero in on the impact of the individual teacher on student achievement gains. Using it, we can begin to distinguish between the best teachers and the worst, so we can begin rewarding the best while learning from their successes and improving - or removing - the worst…

Thomas H. Benton

the message was that a large segment of the population thinks humanities professors are a bunch of left-wing elitists who hate America, are overpaid, underworked, focused on pointless research, and unwilling to teach undergraduates…

I think I understand why many people who feel coerced into attending college at great expense, while still being potentially shut out from economic opportunity, might resent those for whom an elevated social position seems to have come as a matter of course. People resent professors even more when they seem to attack the institutions that give people's lives meaning, such as the military, the church, and the traditional family. Denouncing any of those things from behind the shield of tenure and potentially at taxpayer expense is offensive to most Americans…

Far from being a leisure class, most college teachers are sharing the economic stresses faced by millions of other displaced, downsized, and outsourced workers who see no relief on the horizon…

Douglas W. Texter

Lisa Chavez, the dominatrix of the University of New Mexico… has simply made public what anyone who has spent time in an English department already knew: These departments, modeled on medieval institutions and traditions, are inherently sadomasochistic…

STEPHANIE SIMON And STEPHANIE BANCHERO

"For years and years, universities got away with, 'Trust us—it'll be worth it,'" said F. King Alexander, president of California State University at Long Beach.

But no more: "Every conversation we have with these institutions now revolves around productivity,"…

A funny (to some) comic.